“Elsie,” Harvey said before coming closer.

My calm still intact, I waited for him to speak again and explain why it was he who was collecting me and not the Professor. But something changed in his demeanor, his face blanching before I felt his fingertips lightly touch the skin beneath my bruised left eye and my busted lip.

“Oh.” I sighed, trying to smile.

“Who did this to you?”

The question itself upset him, and he closed his eyes before I could reply. He shook his head once, his jaw clenching as if the two gestures were connected.

“Elsie, who did this?”

Taking his hand from my face, I held it in mine.

“It’s nothing. It’s over and done with now.”

“It isn’t nothing, Elsie.” He tightened his grasp before letting go of my hands and bounding off toward the front door. “Lyman!”

“Harvey, no.” I hurried in front of him as he continued to yell and pressed against his chest until he finally quieted down. His pale eyes were angry, black hair collapsing against his forehead the way Lyman Shepherd’s never would. I hadn’t thought what else to say, and a moment later Harvey pressed forward again, toward the house. I leaned into him, at first to keep him from leaving me, and then suddenly to kiss him. To calm the lines between his eyebrows and fasten us together. To finally trace the back of his neck, the groomed space so stark below his dark hair that it looked inviting even as he walked away.

After a moment, his hand was on my back and he must have felt me smile before we parted. The way he looked at me then put an ache in the very pit of my stomach. Each time his hand moved, slowly rubbing a small circle, something small and lovely fluttered inside me where the cold had once been. And then his jaw clenched again and he stepped away from me.

Lyman was in the doorway, in the same dark place where I’d first seen Dolores.

“It wasn’t him, I promise,” I said to Harvey before looking back to the porch and wondering how long Dolores’s husband had been standing there. “I would tell you if it had been.”

I explained quickly what had happened inside the house and that there was nothing to do, even as I realized there was a good chance Lyman had seen our kiss. I would never know. Cloaked in the shadow of his Queen Anne estate would be the last time I saw the man. And in it, I witnessed his true age at last. More than just the nineteen years between our first intended meeting, and now it was the heaviness of the balcony and gables of the home sagging above him and all they carried.

“I’m no monster,” Lyman called out, and at first I could think to do nothing but shrug.